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Duke University Giving iPods To 1650 Freshmen
baptiste writes "Duke University has entered into an agreement with Apple to distribute iPods to all of the incoming freshmen this year - that's 1650 iPods! This agreement is part of an initiative to "encourage creative uses of technology in education and campus life" The iPods will have audio and text on them including special university content such as "faculty-provided course content, including language lessons, music, recorded lectures and audio books." Faculty will be assisted in creating new content for these devices by Duke's Center for Instructional Technology And here you thought iPods were just for music!"
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How is this different from any of the "mandatory laptop" programs so many shcools impose on freshmen?
Same shit, different hardware.
It's not "free", it's all there in your tuition debt buddy...
Why did the Duke university had to shed out $300+ dollars for an iPod, while they could do the same thing (regarding text scheduling) with a Zire 31 that costs $140, and it can be expanded with SD cards if the students need to also listen to music.
I mean, this way the university could save a truck load of money and give out a handheld that is way more capable than the iPod in running real applications, plus having the ability to play mp3s!
I think that some people who take such decisions are just not practical.
That's some good advertising. It seems like a ploy to lure more kids to their college, rather than a sincere techonological initiative. It's disgusting how colleges in the US are becoming more and more expensive, and entering a competitive advertisement scenario similar to the corporate arena. Hey, with the amount of money they charge for tuition, it's a business well worth it.
Jeez, I wonder what the cost of that deal was. Even at wholesale quantity pricing, that's a boatload of money. Let's see, 1650 iPods, let's assume a hugely generous discount so the wholesale cost is $200 each, that's $330k. Yow.
Of course the students end up paying for it anyway, in the "computer fees" that are usually tacked on to tuition.
Hey kids, Uncle Steve says: Rip, Mix, Burn!
(Yeah like I actually bought music in college..
cassette deck? check. Friends with lots of CDs to borrow?? check. eyepatch and parrot? check.)
This is pretty cool but I must agree with an earlier poster: wouldn't a PDA be more flexible and interesting? I could see students doing all kinds of stuff with a wireless PDA. with the iPod I see them listening to music in class. Woo hoo.
On the other hand, as an Apple shareholder I welcome the strength of the Apple brand to the duke campus! Woo hoo!
ha.. remember that musical montage scene in the movie "Real Genius" where the kid goes to physics lectures, each time he goes to class, there are fewer people and more tape recorders, until finally one day he goes in and there is nobody in the classroom, there's just a tape recorder delivering the lecture to a room full of tape recorders.
I first heard this story in 1974 when I visited MIT, they publish an annual guide for freshmen and someone gave me one, that story was in it, supposedly it was true.
But anyway, I can just see this happening with the iPods. They should have given away the Belkin voice recorder gadgets with the iPods.
Oh come on, give me a break... Sure they can be used for something else, in the same way that you can save any file you want on the iPod, but how many students are really going to use it that way?
WOW! Audio files that aren't music on my iPod. w00t!
. . . Especially the ones working all summer to barely pay their tuition as it is. I mean... who needs food when you have an iPod? Good call Duke! At least schools with mandatory laptop programs can claim they are for school... I don't really know what Duke was thinking. Probably just wanted to gain the image of the most "hip" university or something like that... but it just comes off to me as stupid.
A man walks into a bar. The bartender says, "What is this, some kind of joke?"
While this may seem weird at first, it's really not all that different from Universities that require (or give) students have laptops to a certain specification. Knowing that every student has an iPod lets you do cool things like distribute language lessons for them, be able to standardly trade music for a music class (no more problems with students or teachers that don't have a CD burner or a tape player or a computer to play the music on). Now whether it really makes sense considering the cost of the iPods is another matter, but who knows, Apple is certainly giving them a massive discount because they're both buying in bulk and giving Apple more positive press (just like the G5 cluster did).
...and what happens when the students attach the iPods to their own computers, and get all of the 'educational' audio erased?
Apple has always been strongly involved in education, even when losing ground to PCs in the market, Apple's market share in the educational arena has remained sizeable.
This new move, however, is worrisome. It is clear that is scheme to "distribute" Ipods among Duke freshmen is nothing but a naked marketing move on Apple's part: sellng the already high-margin Ipods at a so-called "discount" to Duke under the thin pretext of using them as an educational device, then pushing Itunes, and relying on the soon-to-be-well-paid Duke graduates to keep buying Apple products in the future.
It is a shame that a fine institution Duke has gone in for such a blatant moneymaking gimmick. This is little different from allowing companies like Coca-Cola to produce "educational" material for our public schools. I would hope the Duke adminsistration would have taken a page from and choose integrity over money, but such is not to be. For shame.
wont affect mine - dook still sucks! /UMD grad
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Is it all that different to other companies providing branded materials to schools servicing younger brackets (i.e., notepads, textbooks, rulers, etc). I've read that this is quite extensive in poorer regions within the US.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Sounds like the proctors were doing their job.
Anybody fooling with any object other than a pencil and the test booklet in the SAT room should be summarily dismissed and fined.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Many professors have still refused to adopt the internet as a way of getting information to students and Al Gore invented that over 10 years ago. Other than the CS classes and a few tech-savy professors elsewhere this won't even be attempted.
For those that do, It will take a long time for them to gather audio lectures and exactly how helpful are they without the visual aids behind them? The same is true for audio books. Technical audio books are not exactly the easiest way to learn a subject. The best use for audio books would be for literature, but as stated above, humanities professors are the ones least inclined to adopt this type of idea. Even then trying to learn the theme or symbolism from an audio book is quite hard. You can't flip back and forth as easily as you can with the written form.
My guess is that there will be a big craze and initial educational push as professors *try* to make the idea work, but after a month it will only be used by students to trade prOn and music before class starts or during lunch. Not that that's a bad thing. I am all for easier to access prOn, but for the majority the educational benefit is little.
Exactly. Saying that this is for educational / creative use is ridiculous. I would bet maybe 100 out of 1650 students are going to really utilize these new ideas, if that. It is purely a recruiting tool.
Because Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, and Apple is not.
There are many tactics which are perfectly acceptable when you own 5% of the market and which are not only unacceptable but illegal when you own 95% of the market.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Distractions? This ain't no high school. If the introduction of a free toy reveals that the entire student body is afflicted with ADD, I think it's time to switch schools. Either that or time for the school to enter into a simliar agreement with the makers of Ritalin.
Face it folks - the iPod (or any large audio player) has massive potential on campus. I've been trying to get my campus to pursue something like this for a while:
Special version of iTunes, that links into the university's library. Using your ID and password, it returns all of the lectures you are a part of and allows you to download them. Taking a humanities class concerning Candide? Download it. History class talking about FDR's fireside chats? Download them. Tired of floppies that are still cluttering up your PC labs (until this very day - arrrrrrggghhhh!)? Let the kids save to the iPod.
The iPod just becomes the central repository for things that, until now, were spread out across the dorm room. If the kid loses it, the kid loses it - same could be said about anything else (books, tapes, DVDs, etc.).
The only application that I don't think will work: audiobooks. It's really difficult to study from an audiobook. Even more difficult to use an audiobook in an open-book test, too...
Actually, I find that the educational potential of portable audio players like the iPod is enormous. The problem at the moment is the scarcity of audio course materials.
I would love to have these universities that are beginning to put courseware online start providing downloadable audio lecture files. (OGG or MP3 to make them as vendor-neutral as possible.)
If they value "broad, liberal education" so much and have such a hard time finding room for all the people who want to enroll, let them provide their history classes, foreign languages, music appreciation, philosophy, poli sci, etc., as downloadable audio courses that anyone can download and, to the extent possible, let those who want credit take a machine gradable test or series of tests so that attention from a live instructor is not needed.
A lot of classes couldn't be done this way (calculus, circuit analysis, etc.), but many could, and this is one way a university could enable engineering students (for ex.) to get more liberal arts and humanities without the need to double tuition and make the university ever tougher to get in to. And once they did the work to create these audio courses, they could let anyone (not just students) download them for just the marginal cost of additional bandwidth. They could then minimize even that cost by putting the material in the public domain and explicitly allowing P2P sharing.
(For that matter, I'd like to see organizations like the BBC, NPR, NHK, etc. start providing their archives in downloadable OGG or MP3 instead of just streaming RealAudio. NHK has terrific language courses available on the radio every day in Japan, but you have to live in Japan to hear them. As far as I know, you can't download them and that seems absurdly wasteful since they put so much work into creating them.)
Then, universities could require students to have portable audio players capable of playing MP3s & OGGs or provide them with one that can and serve more and better courses to more students with fewer faculty and staff and help reduce the outrageous rate of inflation in costs of higher ed.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
"Duke sucks!"
You cant fight in here, its a war room!
Utah Sate University Students get the same! Here in Utah, even the legislature got into the act. They made it mandatory for all students entering the state primarily to go to school pay out-of-state tuition for 2 years instead of one. Yay! They claimed that students didn't contribute anything to the state (taxes or otherwise), so they didn't deserve in-state tuition after just one year. This just goes to show that students should vote. Then they might be able to put a little fear into the politicians.
Don't count your messages before they ACK.
Besides, they don't really need to test your abilities to do arithmetic and the like. Why not just write the test so that there is no real need to use a calculator? Arithmetic is so mindless and it doesn't really relate to modern day job skills.
No, but I've heard of compounding interest. 30k * 4 years = ~$200k
And I think they would've been much better off with mid-level PDA's with pre-loaded data (such as school events in the date book, campus hours in the memo pad, and maps of the campus). I think a freshman has more of a need to be organized than to listen to (even more) music. Besides, you could put solitaire on a PDA!
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I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
at all UNC system schools (Duke included)
Everyone knows that Duke is the University of New Jersey at Durham.
I could get degrees from 5 UNC schools for the price of a Duke degree!
I think that's an outrageous claim. Cuts in Pell grants make a difference. $10 billion of underfunding makes a difference. Cutting AmeriCorps makes a difference. Leadership, or lack thereof, makes a difference in our education system, as off-topic as we are.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Everyone is for responsibility and nobody argues that there's something wrong with asking for accountability. But we should also have responsibility and accountability in our own government, and when you're talking about education, you can surely hold the Bush administration *responsible* for the failing in our education system. In fact, most of the increasing funding that you cite was put in place during the Clinton years.
But no matter how many reports you refer us to, there is nothing phony about the fact that my state of Pennsylvania has a budget squeeze on its college and K-12 institutions due in large part to this President's reckless use of our funds, such as the trillions he has spent on tax cuts which - in my case - wiped out $850 in grants for college so I could receive a $300 tax refund. It makes a difference and education is a failure largely because of the decisions made in Washington, D.C.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!